Lands of the Barbarian Kings - Upcomming Campaign Setting

[Yora]

I have been working on a campaign setting for my own games for a long time and started to share the progressing work process with other people for well over a year now. Having received overwhelmingly positive and encouraging feedback I have made the decision to develop it into fully detailed and fleshed out world that will be suitable for a public release as a campaign setting to other GMs and their groups. While it's not easy as an aspiring writer and RPG developer, especially with no previous experience or industry contacts, the Lands of the Barbarian Kings Campaign Setting is a completely non-profit and amateur project that does not need to meet any sales or profit quotas.
With the 5th Edition of Dungeons & Dragons being expected early, or maybe sometime later next year, I think it's a perfect time for newcomers to reach a potential audience, and it happens to fall into a time that seems to be quite matching up with my own planned schedule. It is yet way too early to say anything definitive about the upcoming edition, but the stated design goals address many of the issues that bother me with most of the Fantasy-RPGs that are currently available. Also we have no actual words on 3rd party support yet, so the degree to which references to the rules of the game will appear in my publications can also not yet be determined.
However, the goal of the Lands of the Barbarian Kings is not to make a strictly D&D setting, but to create a world that can be used as a background for any (or at least most) Fantasy-RPGs that you might prefer. In any event, this work will be very rules light and instead focus on the people, culture, and history of the Barbarian Lands.

The Lands of the Barbarian Kings are exactly what it says on the tin. A large region of diverse lands inhabited by numerous clans of barbaric people. During a time when renaissance and early modern fantasy worlds seems to be all the rage, the Lands of the Barbarian Kings aim for the other end of the spectrum, at the dawn of civilizations during the Bronze and Iron Age. About every fantasy world has a ancient time, when the realms of the elves and dwarves where great and powerful, and when dragons and giants dominated the lands and powerful spirits inhabited the wilderness. An age before magic began to fade from the world, the old races disappeared, and humans became the dominant people. In the Lands of the Barbarian Lands, these ancient times are the present day!
The two primary races are the wood elves and the lizardfolk, two ancient races that were once enslaved by fey lords to build their palaces and castles. With the fey lords having mostly abandoned their holdings in the world of mortals, it was the beginning of the first civilizations of the humanoid people. With the skills they gained during the centuries of their servitude, the primitive clans were able to create their own cultures of agriculture and metalworking, which became the foundations of their own emerging civilizations. Many generations later, the wood elves and lizardfolk have become powerful and growing civilization on their own, and have since been joined by gnomes, dark elves, humans, and the powerful and beast-like kaas. With the survival of their clans secured for the very first time in history, it is the beginning of a time of expansion and exploration deeper into the unknown wilderness of the Barbarian Lands, where both magical wonders and terrible monsters await to be discovered.

The Lands of the Barbarian Kings are a Sword & Sorcery setting, or Heroic Fantasy, if you prefer that term. With only a handful of major centers of civilization and a vast and unforgiving wilderness, it is the PCs who stand at the center of everything. When you set out for adventure, it is for personal reasons. Is it for wealth or glory, or for the protection of your clan or village, it is not you who comes to the adventure. It's the adventure that comes to you! Politics play only a minor role, and if they do, it's usually the diplomacy of the sword.
Above everything else in the Barbarian Lands always stands and dominates the vast wilderness. Towns and the few cities may be protected by walls and palisades and well guarded gates, but their safety usually doesn't reach further than an arrows shot. Once you left your village behind you far enough to not make it back by nightfall, it's only you and the beasts and spirits of the forests and hills! In this world you have to rely on your courage and your wits, with few or no magic weapons at your disposal, and no knightly orders or arcane guilds that will come to your rescue.

Over the last week I've started a number of discussions on the design of campaign settings and with great help from the people here and at other places, I have come up with a design philosophy that could be referred to as the "coloring book" approach. A good campaign setting does not tell you how to play a game and how certain things are to be done. What GMs want is to be guided at creating their own games and telling their own stories. Provide the outlines for a game, but allow everyone to fill it out to their hearts desire. Often published settings appear to be restrictive or there is too much information to sift through before you really get to the essence of what what defines the world and how you can create your own characters who are not just in the world but part of of it. With the Lands of the Barbarian Kings, I want to do just that. Provide the environment and the culture that make up the Barbarian Lands and provide examples for places and people, that GMs can incorporate into their own game, or use as guidelines or inspirations for their very own creations. Having a colorful and multifaceted world does not have to mean that you are strictly tied to a complex canon.
[1], [2].

For the last year, I have shared my ideas with other people and recieved their input and feedback at the Giant in the Playground forum in this thread, where you can take a look of the process and the ideas we have pondered. In addition, I created the Barbaripedia, an online archive for the current state of the settings development. At the beginning of the next year, I plan to release the first official Campaign Setting pdf, which for accessibility will probably be about 80 pages in length. Long enough to get at the heart of things, but short enough to give it a good read even if you're new and yet only moderately interested into the setting.
Since there is no dedicated homebrew section on this forum, I instead used the social group function to create a dedicated Lands of the Barbarian Kings group. If you are interested in discussing the development of the upcoming setting or to receive regular updates on recent additions, feel free to join at any time.

 

[Lwaxy]

Sharing settings is always cool

 

[kitsune9]

Good luck!

 

[Yora]

An Introduction to the Barbarian Lands

Now that the background and goals of the setting have been established, I'd like to give an introduction to the world itself. While the concept and process are interesting, this is what you really get and what the whole thing is actually about:

As a visual reference, I have this crude map: The Barbarian Lands
It's not beautiful and the shapes and sizes are all wrong, but it shows where everything is in relation to each other.

The Lands of the Barbarian Kings is an ancient world, that is inhabited by very young people. The world itself consists of two primary dimensions, the world or mortals, and the world of spirits. As the names imply, the world of mortals is the home of the humanoid races and common animals. It is primarily a physical world of mortal creatures that possess no magical abilities. While the Spiritworld appears very similar at first glance, it is a world of magical and natural energies and home to all kinds of spirits, like the immortal humanoid shie, the snake-like naga, oni, treants, rakshasa, and djinns, as well as the spirits of the land itself. While the Spiritworld is a hostile place for mortal creatures, which are not accustomed to the violent storms, blistering sun, and chilling cold, that can freeze a man solid in mid-stride, it is very easy for spirits to travel between the two worlds. And for a period that spanned countless centuries, many of the fey people created and lived in magical castles and palaces in both the worlds of spirits and mortals. But eventually, for reasons unknown to even the spirits of the present age, these citadels became abandoned one by one, with the fey people returning back to the Spiritworld or the wilderness of the world of mortals. However, they had left a permanent mark on the world, that would shape the future of its native people.
During their time in the world of mortal creatures, the fey people encountered primitive humanoids, living in caves or tiny huts made of reeds, but yet showed an intelligence far above that of all the other animals. It was mostly the lizardfolk and the elves, who became favored as slaves, who would work the fields and mines of the fey lords. For many centuries they lived in servitude, encountering the secrets of farming, writing, and metal. When the fey left, their slaves stayed behind and were abandoned to fend for themselves, and returned back into the wilds, where they rejoined their own people. For well over a thousand years, only a few naga strongholds, that remained in the jungles of the southern lands, where the only form of advanced civilization anywhere in the world of mortal creatures. However, the returned slaves did not forget about the skills they had gained during their servitude and shared them with their new clans, where they survived as closely guarded secrets. Possessing a great advantage over other groups, the small family groups of only a few dozen individuals were absorbed one by one, leading to the rise of clans that number in the thousands. And for the first time in over a hundred generations, a new age of civilization was beginning, the Age of Clans.
The Age of Clans was the age of agriculture and bronze, the two technologies that defined life throughout all of the Barbarian Lands. And fertile farming land, as well as mines for copper and tin, became the most valuable possessions that were prized above anything else and would ensure survival for the clans that possessed them. Which in turn meant that war for these invaluable lands was both violent and unavoidable. For many centuries and countless generations, this was the life of the lizardfolk, the wood elves, the dark elves, the gnomes, and the kaas, a race of puma faced humanoids of great strength from the northern lands.
But everything would change at the dawn of the Age of Kings, four centuries before the present day. With agriculture maing great leaps forward, the clans could now grow much larger amounts of food even on soils that were far from perfect for it, which brought with it a new and formerly unknown prosperity. Being able to grow more than they would need for their own survival, trade was on the rise between the clans and small farming and fishing villages began to grow into true towns and cities. Also, the secrets of forging steel was shared by the gnomes, which soon became a resource as valuable as gold and those who had access to it gained a great advantage over their enemies. Within only a few generations, the constant wars for land were almost entirely forgotten. Now it was a war for trade and powerful alliances. Merchants traveled to far away places that were formerly known only from legend and returned with goods that had never before been seen by anyone in the Barbarian Lands. The most important and influential trade route was the road through the Kaidis Valley, which connected the lands on the Inner Sea with the lands beyond the Great Plains in the west. The nomads who traveled the plains carried and bartered with goods from the Western Lands, which were invaluable in the Barbarian Lands. With the kings and chieftains constantly raiding each others caravans, as well as regular skirmishes on the borders of their lands as displays of power and dominance, the clans needed larger armies and more troops than they could raise themselves. When wood elf merchants started to hire human guards from the nomads of the Great Plains to accompany their caravans on the trips back to the Inner Sea, they would change the Barbarian Lands forever. The human warriors proved to be such valuable additions to the armies of the elves that entire companies of mercenaries would accompany the nomads on their way to the trade posts and hire themselves out to elven chieftains and often would end in permanent employment for their new masters. Once the humans had decided to permanently settle on the Inner Sea, it was the beginning of a large migration that lasted for several decades, when whole clans from the Western Lands arrived and established themselves as the fifth major race of the Barbarian Lands. This did not remain unnoticed by the local wood elves and started another series of wars, which ended with the newly arrived humans being here to stay.
After centuries of wars between the clans, the situation in the Barbarian Lands finally started to stabilize again. Smaller clans had been destroyed or absorbed into larger ones, giving rise to the first true kingdoms, and many of the trading grounds where the clans would come together to trade and negotiate alliances grew into true cities. But with the borders of their land secured, the warriors of the clans returned their gaze back on the huge and unexplored wilderness, that lies beyond their small islands of civilization. The amount of wonders and treasures, that are still hidden under the leaves of the Shenna'hir Forest and the Mahiri Jungles have an irresistible pull on young warriors, who yearn for the fame and glory of their ancestors, and powerful magical artifacts can shift the balance of power in favor of anyone who discovers and possesses them. Even with the Barbarian Kings having united most of the clans, it is still every village for itself in times of crises. When winter closes the mountain passes and makes the river impassable, nobody will come to provide help against monsters that come from the wilderness or angry spirits yearning for revenge against ancient wrongs committed by former generations. More often than not, warriors have to set out on adventures not because they want to, but because they have to.

 

[Yora]

The people and culture of the Barbarian Lands

After the background, I now want to give you an idea what kind of world the Barbarian Lands actually are, and what kind of people the PCs will be.

The Lands of the Barbarian Kings are a mostly Bronze Age to early Iron Age world. However, the people are neither cave men, nor are they all covered in mud and plagued by disease and filth like you would see in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. That portrayal is just nonsense and has been repeated much to often.
The Barbarian Lands are a world in which the concept of nations does not exist. The primary unit of society is the clan. A clan consists of some thousand people ranging from ten thousand to a hundred thousands individuals, who all share a common culture and a shared ancestor. In reality not all members of a clan are actually descendants of the clans founder, but in the eyes of the people, when a warrior asks his companions to join his family, that makes them all relatives equal to his brothers and sisters in blood. While the exact structures and hierarchies vary between the many different people of the Barbarian Lands, they all share many common features that are found almost everywhere. At the head of the clan is the chieftain, who usually is a man, or more rarely a woman, descended from the clans founder, but any member of the clan can be named as a successor. Below the chieftain are the sub-chiefs, who are usually descendants of the founders companions or siblings and who lead groups of smaller villages that do not lie right next to the chieftains castle. At the end of the Age of Clans, when the fight for control over land changed to a fight for influence and control over trade, some chieftains formed powerful alliances, that often became permanent in nature. The leaders of these alliances are often called kings and elected from the chieftains of the alliance. It is quite common that kingship is held by a single clan for many generations, but sometimes it can also shift to the chieftains of another clan. Altogether, there are about 500 clans throughout all the Barbarian Lands.

Almost everyone in the Barbarian Lands falls into one of five social ranks.
At the top of society are the nobles, which in most clans are more an informal group than an actual established genealogical elite. The nobles consists of the kings, chieftains, and sub-chiefs, as well as their immediate families, and shamans and priests are also very often ranked of equal status.
The majority of the people are the clansmen. These are all the other people whose forefathers have joined the clans founder or have later been admitted into the clan.
Below the clansmen are the free men. Free men are not members of a clan, but have been given the right to live on the clans land and gain protection by the clans warriors in return for higher taxes they have to pay the chieftain. Free men are usually farmers or merchants and not accepted among the warriors. When a free man has proved his worth in combat, he will usually be elevated into the ranks of the clansmen and be adopted by the clans chieftain along with his immediate family. Free men can not own any land that belongs to the clan, but can be given part of the chieftains land to work. The number of free men in a clan can range from one in eight to as much as two in five.
At the bottom of society are the slaves. In most societies, slaves are owned by the clan and are under command by the chieftain alone, to be assigned to sub-chiefs who oversee their work on the clans land. Clansmen who have distinguished themselves may also receive some slaves form their own farms and households, but may lose the privilege if they don't treat the chieftains slaves as the chieftain deems appropriate. It is not uncommon for most clans to have between one in four and one in three of its people to be slaves.
In addition, there are also the outcast, who do not belong to any clan. Within the great cities, clanless people can become quite wealthy and powerful, but everywhere else they are usually regarded as being even lower than slaves, as they don't have any clan who would support them and protect them from enemies. Many outcasts are bandits or witches, who have no place in the society of the clans. Being banished from the clan is one of the worst punishments a chieftain can decide, as few clans will accept an outcast into their ranks.

Most people live in villages of a few hundred people, which are often closely bunched together for mutual safety and ruled by a sub-chief. Chieftains usually reside in a castle that is surrounded by a town, which is the center of trade for the clan. True cities are rare and usually exist outside the system of clans and kingdoms. Most of them are important centers of trade near conjunctions of several major trade routes, where the clans come together for negotiations and trade, but also to find allies and mercenaries for plots against their rivals.
In the Barbarian Lands, worship of the spirits of the land plays a very important role in the society of the clans. Spirits can be found everywhere and it is only through there support that the humanoid people can grow the crops and hunt the game to feed their villages. Friendly spirits are powerful protectors, who can guard the village from famine, plague, monsters, and bandits, but a spirit who has been angered is a terrible foe who can destroy a whole village in just a single year. To appease the spirits and maintain a peaceful relationship is the duty of the shamans. Every village and town has at least one shaman and one or two apprentices who will bring offerings to the spirits and consult them in times of crisis. In this capacity, they stand both above and outside the rest of society. Most of them are both highly respected and revered for the vital service they perform, but also feared for the magical powers they wield. This holds true even more so for sorcerers and witches, who usually live entirely outside the villages or even the clans and provide their services to anyone who is willing to deal with them and can afford to pay them.

The most numerous of the humanoid people are the lizardfolk and the elves, with the lizardfolk being greater in numbers than either the wood elves or the dark elves. These peoples are also the most advanced when it comes to culture, technology, and magic, as they have been the first who learned about these things from the fey people. The lizardfolk are the dominant people in the Mahiri Jungles and the Nazraja Islands. Standing taller than most other people and being significantly stronger, they are a common sight as bodyguards and mercenaries throughout the Barbarian Lands. While most of them are not of the intellectual type, visitors to their cities are often surprised and amazed by the grandeur of their architecture and the huge libraries maintained by their priests and scholars.
In the northern lands, the most numerous people are the wood elves, who are at home in the great forests and the Mherian Islands, but even they rarely venture far away from the safety of their villages and into the unknown wilds beyond.
Between these two major civilizations lie the lands of the dark elves, south of the Kaidis Valley. Dark skinned and with excellent eyes, the dark elves are perfectly adapted to live in the twilight and the darkness of the night. Making their villages in large caves or elaborate underground halls, they are also as home in the dark depths of the world as the gnomes, with some of them only rarely visiting the surface world, if at all.
In addition there are also the gnomes, a race of short humanoids who are only small in numbers, but also look back on a long history. At home in several of the hills and mountains of the Barbarian Lands, they are the undisputed masters of metalworking and alchemy. Almost all steel that is worth anything comes from gnomish forges and the are the only people who known how to make heavy steel armor.
Far in the north lives a race known as the kaas. Similar to humans in stature, they stand well over seven feet high and are entirely covered in short brown fur and sport long, dark brown manes. With faces that seem to combine features of pumas, dogs, and bears, they seem brutish and bestial in nature, but are a very sophisticated people that lives of herding reindeer and mountain goats in the plains and mountains of their frozen homelands, in addition to hunting.
The latest additions are the humans, who have existed in the Barbarian Lands as small groups in remote regions for a very long time, but have become one of the major races only a few centuries ago when they migrated from the Western Lands in large numbers, following the promise of riches from serving in the armies of elven lords at constant war with one another. While lacking the grand cities or magic traditions of the older races, humans have firmly established themselves as capable warriors and crafty merchants and explorers, who play an important part in the discoveries of new wonders and treasures that are still hidden in the wilderness of the Barbarian Lands.